Daily Savings on Books

Chong tells the story of her grandmother, brought from China as a young concubine by a sojourner to the New World, of the man's wife and children left behind, and of the author's incredible discovery of those children six decades later. "Beautiful, haunting, and wise."--New York Times Book Review. Photos.

This is the story of a couple's travels on a forty-foot trawler cruising 6300 miles and 145 locks around the eastern part of North America known as America's Great Loop or the Great Circle Cruise. Their nautical ineptitude is evident from the beginning, but pulling from their personal and collective strengths, the authors overcome doubt, a lack of experience, and real and imagined horrors. The odyssey is told the way life hands out its adventures -- sometimes humorously, sometimes tragically, but always memorably. The writing is light and appealing, but there is a serious strain running through the book for those who relish history and descriptions of the landscape. Astute and attentive to detail, they chronicled events and kept an account of expenses, equipment and charting. As a result, the appendix/guidebook is worth the price of the book for anyone interested in planning their cruise. Topics include necessary charts and guidebooks, information on locks, sett! ing an itinerary, resource addresses and websites, details on equipment and the best place to be educated about boating. The book has full-color inserts with black and white photographs interspersed throughout.

<DIV>In 1930 two novice paddlers--Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port--launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay--with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. The newspaper stories that Sevareid wrote on this trip launched his distinguished journalism career, which included more than a decade as a television correspondent and commentator on the CBS Evening News. Now with a new foreword by Arctic explorer, Ann Bancroft.

Shut Up, I'm Talking is a smart, hilarious insider take on Israeli politics that reads like the bastard child of Thomas Friedman and David Sedaris. Now a political writer for Salon, Gregory Levey stumbled into a job as speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations at age twenty-five and suddenly found himself, like a latter-day Zelig, in the company of foreign ministers, U.S. senators, and heads of state. Much to his surprise, he was soon attending U.N. sessions and drafting official government statements. The situation got stranger still when he was transferred to Jerusalem to write speeches for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.<P><I>Shut Up, I'm Talking is a startling account of Levey's journey into the nerve center of Middle Eastern politics at one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history. During his three years in the Israeli government, the Second Intifada continued on in fits and starts, Yasser Arafat died, Hamas came to power, and Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Levey was repeatedly thrust into highly improbable situations -- from being the sole "Israeli" delegate (even though he's Canadian) at the U.N. General Assembly, with no idea how "his" country wanted to vote; to nearly inciting an international incident with his high school French translation of an Arab diplomat's anti-Israel remarks; to communicating with Israeli intelligence about the suspected perpetrators of suicide bombings; to being offered leftover salami from Ariel Sharon's lunch. As Levey got better acquainted with the personalities in the government's inner sanctum, he witnessed firsthand the improvisational and ridiculously casual nature of the country's behind-the-scenes leadership -- and realized that he wasn't the only one faking his way through politics.

With sharp insight and great appreciation for the absurd, Levey offers the first-ever look inside Israel's politics from the perspective of a complete outsider, ultimately concluding that the Israeli government is no place for a nice Jewish boy.

This is a biography and astonishing adventure story of a woman who, left a widow in 1927, packed her five children onto a 25-foot boat and cruised the coastal waters of British Columbia, summer after summer. Muriel Wylie Blanchet acted single-handedly as skipper, navigator, engineer and, of course, mum, as she saw her crew through encounters with tides, fog, storms, rapids, cougars and bears. She sharpened in her children a special interest in Haida culture and in nature itself. In this book, she left us with a sensitive and compelling account of their journeys.

In the boomtowns of the Alaska-Yukon stampedes, where gold dust was common currency, the rarest commodity was an attractive woman, and her company could be costly. Author Lael Morgan takes you into the heart of the gold rush demimonde, that ""half world"" of prostitutes, dance hall girls, and entertainers who lived on the outskirts of polite society. Meet ""Dutch Kate"" Wilson, who pioneered many areas long before the ""respectable"" women who received credit for getting there first ... ruthless heartbreakers Cad Wilson and Rose Blumkin ... ""French"" Marie Larose, who auctioned herself off as a wife to the highest bidder ... Georgia Lee, who invested her earnings wisely and became one of the richest women in the North ... and Edith Neile, called ""the Oregon Mare,"" famous for both her outlandish behavior and her softhearted generosity.

After her husband died in 1927, leaving her with five small children, everyone expected the struggles of single motherhood on a remote island to overcome M. Wylie Blanchet. Instead, this courageous woman became one of the pioneers of “family travel,” acting as both mother and captain of the twenty-five-foot boat that became her family’s home during the long Northwest summers. Blanchet’s lyrically written account reads like fantastic fiction, but her adventures are all very real. There are dangers—rough water, bad weather, wild animals—but there are also the quiet respect and deep peace of a woman teaching her children the wonder and awesome depth of the natural world. “Filled with observations on natural history and the wonders of the wild, (Blanchet's) prose, like the waterfall she describes, sings.”—Kliatt

John Hildebrand sets out in a canoe . . . to explore the great riverway of northwestern Canada and Alaska. . . . The geography is closely rendered and the characters especially sharply drawn. The country is filled with mad dropouts at river fish camps, good-hearted girls in the towns, sullen natives in tumbledown villages, cranky old-timers, terrible drunks and worse moralizers who live off the wild landscape and its abundant resources. . . . This is a fine work, and Hildebrand is a fine writer.Charles E. Little, Wilderness For many of us the North has been the one place where a certain elemental experienceof land, water, and peoplecan still be had. John Hildebrands personal account of this experience has a particular freshness and poignancy. It is the record of a journey, as much inward as it is outward, and all the better for that.John Haines, author of The Stars, The Snow, The Fire A finely written account of coming to terms with ones self, of the realities of ones dreams. Recommended for anyone who would follow Thoreau into the woods, even now.Library Journal Hildebrand has every skill of mind and craft to enfold us in his experience.The New Yorker